BOMBCRASH by Xander Davis - www.xanderdavis.com FlashBuilder 4 + ActionScript 3.0 + Flixel
This is my first entry in Ludum Dare!
You're an unarmed robot engineer and humanity's only hope from the rampant bomb-bots! Run and dash through the levels of the space station to reach hacking terminals, where you can set groups of robots to self-destruct and turn them against other robots! As you do, don't let them hit you, but lure them to crash into other bots!
Nicely done. I actually enjoyed this game quite a bit. It had interesting gameplay and level design. It was quite difficult at times, but never got too frustrating. I may have missed something, but I couldn't tell which terminals associated with which colors. Also, you don't have a diagonal run animation for the player character.
It was a pretty solid interpretation of the theme. I think a few bugfixes and licks of polish (such as having nice animations for colliding robots, and not letting them collide when offscreen) could really pick it up. I think there's a really decent game in there waiting to be teased out!
I could not do the third level at all. I guess I didn't have the patience to wait for the enemies to randomly move where I wanted them to. The visuals are impressive, though.
Looks lovely, and a nice idea, but I found it quite hard to get the bomb robots to collide with each other. Which is a shame, because it's a neat concept!
Other than that it was very polished, and beating a level was quite satisfying. I like the countdown overlay in particular.
Very polished, and maybe if getting robots to smash into each other was easier then it would really sing as a game :)
Awesome game, but it was very difficult to actually get the enemies to collide. Trying to coax them into moving towards me usually resulted in me dying because I wasn't able to react quickly enough to move away once I noticed they'd started following me, even with the ability to dash. Most of the enemies that collided just seemed to of their own volition, usually when I was off screen, which made it tempting to just stay in a corner for awhile until most of them had killed each other.
Other than that, really solid game, awesome art and a nice take on the theme!
As has been mentioned, the collision boxes for the enemies doesn't feel right. It's like you die by touching their shadow, which made it very unforgiving and frustrating at times. Ignoring that though, fun and polished game!
Looks like I'm not the first to say, but Xander, you're using the entire sprites as collision boxes in a game with an angled view. Think about where the characters are standing. If you want to be really nice to the player, try a radius-based collision centered around the characters' feet.
Your game is awesome and complete. Everything ties in amazingly well for a game developed in 48 hours. All the more reason for me to be aggrevated that your journal is empty and the only coverage of your game dev expedition that I can locate is what little is on your Twitter feed!
I really look forward to seeing more of your work. I hope to see you at the next Ludum Dare. And I really hope to get some insight into Xander's 48 hours the next time around.
Sometimes I would get close to the enemies, but they wouldn't be interested in chasing me. I had that happen with an enemy near a terminal, so I couldn't get to the terminal.
As others have said, collision boxes are way too big. That's fine when you're colliding enemies into one another, but really annoying when trying to avoid them.
The enemies were very unpredictable, and their hitboxes were way too big. That made it really difficult. I also didn't quite understand what happened when I hacked the terminal. I thought I won, so I started moving to the left and an enemy killed me. The graphics are very nice.
The one thing that would've made this game a lot more fun to play rather than an exercise in frustration would have been to base the collisions of the location of the feet of the hero against the feet of the other robots. The collision area is just way to large and visually wrong so that anytime the player is faced with what would be a fun tense dash to avoid the movement of the robots--that is robbed from the player with a frustrating death and restart. Other than that major point I enjoyed the basic simple concept and the graphics, sound, and implementation.
Comments16
Other than that it was very polished, and beating a level was quite satisfying. I like the countdown overlay in particular.
Very polished, and maybe if getting robots to smash into each other was easier then it would really sing as a game :)
Other than that, really solid game, awesome art and a nice take on the theme!
Your game is awesome and complete. Everything ties in amazingly well for a game developed in 48 hours. All the more reason for me to be aggrevated that your journal is empty and the only coverage of your game dev expedition that I can locate is what little is on your Twitter feed!
I really look forward to seeing more of your work. I hope to see you at the next Ludum Dare. And I really hope to get some insight into Xander's 48 hours the next time around.